What is backing? What is laying? How do I place an order?
How does exchange betting work?
Sportbooks vs Betting Exchanges
Normally when using a sportsbook you choose a wager that you think will win. You make your selection, choose your stake and place your bet.
With a betting exchange such as BetDex, you can choose to bet for a selection occurring (backing) or you can bet against a selection occurring (laying). Additionally, you can choose the odds at which you want to place your bet or order. Back orders get matched against lay orders as long as they agree on a price (the odds) at which the event will or won't occur.
Because betting exchanges allow users to trade with one another they remove the need for the margin that traditional sportsbooks incorporate into their prices. This provides the opportunity for a more efficient marketplace and users can get much better odds than they would get on a traditional sportsbook.
To best understand how this works, let's choose an example market:
There are a lot of things going on here but let's concentrate on the numbers in the purple and red boxes.
BACKING
The purple boxes show the current best offer available to BACK a selection, so in this example, if I think Nottingham Forest will win then I select the purple box to BACK Nottingham Forest.
So here I have the price of 12.5 and I can enter my stake. If I enter a stake of 1 and place the order, I would effectively get a profit of 11.5 if Nottingham Forest won the game assuming my back order was successfully matched against an equivalent lay order.
When you place a back order, you are stating you think the selection will win!
LAYING
In this example, we will take the Everton v Crystal Palace game and look at placing a lay order on Everton.
If we are laying Everton, we can use the red button next to the selection. We can see the current best lay price is 2.74 so let's click that and enter a stake of 500:
We now see we have a risk value here. That's because if we lay a selection we are predicting that it will not occur. So laying Everton at 2.74 means that you think Everton WILL NOT win and you will get 500 if this is true BUT - If Everton do win, you will lose 870.
When you lay a market, you are stating you think the selection will lose!
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